Category Archives: Religous Irreverence

So what exactly is this “gay agenda” I keep hearing about? Right wing groups claim that gays are trying to shove their gay agendas down straight people’s throats. (I thought gays preferred to shove something else down throats, but no matter.)

As a devout Christian, I have a few questions about this so-called gay agenda.

Is a gay agenda like a business plan that gays have to draft and get approved before they can “choose” a gay lifestyle? Continue reading →

Have you read something that makes you think: “how can anyone be that stupid?” What am I saying? Of course you have if you read stuff on the Internet! The Internet allows anybody who is even mildly literate to post anything their dinosaur brain can formulate into letters and words. Continue reading →

Like this:

You don’t need a prayer
And there’s no price to ask why
Sometimes you’ll find an answer in the sky
Answer in the Sky, lyrics by B. Taupin
(c) 2004 HST Management Ltd./Rouge Booze, Inc.

I am embarrassed to admit that before Saturday, I had never heard of Richard Dawkins and had no idea who he was. No, not Richard Dawson, the actor from Hogan’s Heroes and Family Feud. That’s a different guy, and I think he’s dead.

Richard Dawkins is still very much alive, although if the amount and ferocity of hate mail he receives is any indication of his chances for longevity, I’d recommend that he update his will sooner rather than later.

You’ve never heard of him either? Good, I’m not the only one. So, who is he? According to Wikipedia (the oxymoron of accurate information), he’s an ethologist, evolutionary biologist and writer. He’s also an outspoken atheist.

Richard Dawkins is still alive.

When I tried to read up about him on Wikipedia, I got very confused. Here’s an example of what I mean:

In 1982, he introduced into evolutionary biology the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism’s body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.

I had no idea what “phenotype” meant, so I followed that link. But the explanation of phenotype used more words I did not know, so I had to follow those links, which lead me to more links and so on and so on. But none of the articles explained him in Plain English.

I know I’m smart, but as a graduate of W&M, I have no illusions about my intelligence. Most of the people I went to school with there were a lot smarter than me. As a result of that humbling experience, when I enter a room, I never assume I’m the smartest person there. I wait for other people to start talking before I make up my mind. As Lincoln said:

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Fools usually have no problem self-identifying. Of course, I’m probably safe in saying I’m smarter than Kim Kardashian, but considering she’s rich and famous and I’m not, she must have something going for her. It’s probably her booty, not her brains.

The point is, I did not understand a lot of the evolutionary biology stuff. No matter, it was his stance on religion that got my attention. Although he is a scientist, in 2006 he published a book called The God Delusion, in which he wrote that God does not exist, and religious faith is a delusion—”a fixed false belief”.

I understand why he thinks that God does not exist. According to Dawkins, God’s existence cannot be proven by scientific methods. If science cannot prove that God exists, then God does not exist.

At the same time, science has not disproven God’s existence either. That’s why a belief in God relies on faith. One of the definitions of the word faith is “a belief not based on proof.” There you go. One has to have faith that God is real.

So I get the part about him saying God does not exist. What I don’t understand is why he cares so much that people believe in God. I kept reading more articles about him, but none of them answered my question. Wikipedia certainly didn’t help.

I went on Youtube and found some fascinating interviews in which he attempts to explain why he is so adamant that people stop believing in God. The best interview I found was here:

Dawkins says religion is bad because it has been used to justify wars over time. He says that dogmatic beliefs can be pernicious beliefs that drive people to do awful things. True. Can’t argue with that.

But what about people like me, who aren’t fanatics? I’m not going to join a terrorists cell and try to blow up a French newspaper I’ve never heard of or a café full of Norwegians. Why would I do that? I have nothing against Norwegians. Most of them are probably perfectly nice people. I wonder how many of them believe in God?

Why does it bother him so much that people like me, who believe in science and evolution, also believe in a divine being?

Dawkins says he’s against religion because it “teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” That’s not true for everyone. I think a lot of scientists who believe in God would say he’s wrong about that.

Do I believe that the world was created in seven days and is only 10,000 years old? No. The Bible was not written by God. It was written by men inspired by their beliefs in God. The Bible is rooted in the times in which it was written. Science did not exist then, so the authors provided answers as best they could. One has to cull through the historical stuff, pick out the moral code and leave the rest behind.

And consider this. According to some sources, more than half the people in the world believe in God. If religion is so off the mark, how did it get such a stronghold on the world? My dad used to say “50 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.” Are we all delusional? Dawkins would say yes.

Even if Dawkins is right about God, however, he seems to be conveniently ignoring a facet of human nature that science will not change. People are looking for something to believe in, something bigger than themselves. Science as a belief, well it just doesn’t cut the mustard. Science doesn’t have angels and water that turns into wine. Just like many of us would like to believe in ghosts, we’d like to think miracles are possible too.

When Jon Stewart interviewed Dawkins on the Daily Show, they discussed the question of how the universe got started. Dawkins said not to think about it as a defined starting line. He said that some organism started it all. So Stewart asks: “where did that organism come from?” Dawkins did not answer this question.

After their discussion, Stewart summed the topic up nicely:

This is so cool to think about. Do you want to get high later?

At the end of the day, what’s wrong with hedging one’s bets? The way I look at it is this. If I believe in God and it turns out there is no God, then when I die, poof! I’m gone. But what have I lost in the meantime? Nothing.

But if there is a God and I don’t believe, then I could be in trouble when I get to the pearly gates, assuming I even get that far.

Finally, if there is a God and I do believe, then I’m golden.

So it makes sense to me to believe. So sue me. If it makes me a better person, and I think it does, then again I ask, why does Richard Dawkins care so much that I believe in God?

I’m at the point now where I’m just laughing as each new thing goes wrong. There’s nothing I can do about any of them. I can’t mention some of them, because they have to do with the house I’m trying to sell. But suffice it to say, we will be pouring more money into the house before we can sell it. We just replaced the kitchen appliances with stainless steel, because buyers want to see an “updated kitchen.” And Billy, the ultimate handy man, is replacing the fixtures, lights and mirrors in the bathrooms, and painting the vanities. The rooms look fantastic. But so far, no dice.

Elton John and David Furnish–why shouldn’t they be allowed to get married?

I believe in love, it’s all we got

Love has no boundaries, costs nothing to touch

Churches and dictators, politics and papers

Everything crumbles sooner or later

But love, I believe in love

“Believe,” lyrics by Bernie Taupin

(c) 1995 William A. Bong Limited

With the recent news from the U.S. Supreme Court about gay marriage, the religious right has come out in full force to condemn it.

I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. If people would just listen to me, we could put this issue to bed once and for all.

Christians who oppose gay marriage often quote scripture from the Bible in support of their position. Simply put, it “offends God”:

Whenever one violates the natural moral order established by God, one sins and offends God. Same-sex “marriage” does just this. Accordingly, anyone who professes to love God must be opposed to it.

Marriage is not the creature of any State. Rather, it was established by God in Paradise for our first parents, Adam and Eve. As we read in the Book of Genesis: “God created man in His image; in the Divine image he created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them, saying: ‘Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.’” (Gen. 1:28-29)– Excerpt from “10 Reasons why Homosexual Marriage is Harmful and Must be opposed.”Ok then, if you are going to follow—and seek to enforce– the Bible’s commands, then you have to follow all of the Bible’s commands. You don’t get to pick and choose the ones you want to enforce, and ignore the ones you would rather weren’t in the Bible.

Therefore, if gay marriage “violates the natural moral order established by God,” then so does divorce:

By law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. So then, if she marries another while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. Romans 7:2-3

Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery. Luke 16:18

How many of the people who are against gay marriage are also against divorce? An even better question—how many of them ARE divorced? Why is divorce ok but gay marriage is not?

Here’s my take on all of this. The Bible must be read in the context of its times, economic, social and scientific. It was written before the age of scientific discovery. So to explain things like how the world got started, we have the story in Genesis. Was the earth really created in six days and then on the seventh God rested? Really? If God is all powerful, why did he need a day of rest anyway?

The Bible is full of parables, allegories and unscientific information that’s just plain wrong. I don’t think the Bible was ever meant to be a scientific treatise. Even Pope Francis agrees with this. He recently declared that evolution and the Big Bang theory are right and that God is not magician with a magic wand. Too bad fundamentalist Christians don’t listen to the Pope.

I can’t reconcile everything that’s in the Bible. I’m not a biblical scholar. But I am a Christian. As a Christian, I disagree vehemently that “anyone who loves God” must oppose gay marriage. I think it’s just the opposite. Anyone who loves God must not condemn gay marriage.

It’s the fundamental message that Jesus brought to the world that’s important, and that message is love, tolerance and respect for others: This is my command: Love each other. John 15:17.

That message has not changed. It remains as relevant today as it did back when the Bible was written. Maybe even more relevant.

The bottom line for me is this: If (and that is a big, qualified If) gay marriage offends God, then it is up to God, and only God, to judge.

Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Luke 6:37

Even Jesus said he was not the one to judge.

As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it. John 12:47

The rest of us should stop condemning others and endeavor to love even those with whom we don’t agree. In fact, those are the most important people to love and tolerate. As Jesus said, it’s easy to love your friends. But a true Christian must strive for more than that.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? . . but love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting anything back. Luke 6:32, 35

I guess I should take a page out of my own book and forgive those who trespassed against me, shouldn’t I? I’m trying, I really am.

GOD HATES THE CONSTITUTION

They stand in front of churchesThey stand in front of crowdsThey carry signs that tell usGod’s message from the clouds

God hates the constitutionHe wants to pray in schoolsThe godly have solutionsThe rest of us are fools

I guess they have a private lineDirectly to the LordBut the line must have some staticPerhaps a faulty mother board?

When I read the BibleThe message there is loveAnd tolerance for everyone– That’s the dispatch from above

And if it is a sinWhatever they decryJesus said, before you judgeTake that log out of your eye.

It’s no wonder that so many people hate organized religion. Religion has been used to justify war, genocide, imperialism, segregation and all sorts of discrimination. Remember studying “Manifest Destiny” in the eighth grade? No? Well I do. It was a widely held belief in the 19thcentury that it was God’s will that American settlers expand throughout the continent. It was used by politicians to justify the war with Mexico in 1840 and the genocide of native Americans so the country could expand all the way to the west coast.

In 1959, religion was used to try to justify segregation and laws against interracial marriage:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

– Judge Leon M. Bazile, January 6, 1959

Then on a personal level, there’s the “I’m not perfect, just forgiven” mentality, which argues that it’s ok to lie, cheat and generally be an asshole because Jesus forgives us for our sins. I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he said: This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Matthew 26:28, NIV.

Jesus did not die on the cross so you could throw a colleague under the bus in order to get a promotion.

Which brings us to today’s song parody, entitled “Good Christian Woman,” to be sung to the tune of the Rolling Stone’s “Honky Tonk Women.”

A GOOD CHRISTIAN WOMAN

I met a Yale-bred lawyer down in Richmond

She tried to throw me underneath a bus

She told me that she’d pray for me on Sunday

Because she didn’t smoke or drink or cuss

Chorus:

She’s a good Christian woman

Gimme, gimme, gimme the hypocrite blues

The girl in HR said she couldn’t help me

The nemesis, she said, was here to stay

She offered me advice that I should follow

“If you see her coming, you should pray.”

The nemesis she sings in her church choir

But honesty don’t bother her too much

I wonder when she runs her colleagues over

Does she ever even feel the slightest bump?

She smiles like a giant Cheshire tabby

Her mouth is full of lies as well as gums

And when she stabs the minions in the backside

Onward Christian Soldiers she does hum

When she meets the GC she brings good news

“I solved another problem; it’s no more”

Of course she fails to mention to the GC

There really weren’t no problem there before

(c) 2014 Renata Manzo– this is a work of my imagination. Any resemblance to an actual person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Like this:

“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” Luke 18:16, NIV

The years between ages 11 and 22 were rough. Fortunately, I had some help from the man upstairs.

As I mentioned in “Christmas 1971,” we moved from Maryland to California right after Christmas. We moved in with my grandmother and my Aunt Cecelia in Inglewood. Yes, that Inglewood, where “all the rappers come from” according to one of my friends.

We stayed there for eight months. All five of us hated L.A. I missed trees. In L.A., instead of trees in the highway median strips, the concrete was painted green.

In August we moved back to Maryland. My dad bought a house in Odenton in a small neighborhood of split level homes that all looked exactly the same. (“Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky . . .”)

I started at a new school (junior high school, no less) where I did not know anyone. This didn’t bother me as I was used to that. I didn’t have any of my school records, however, so I had to take a placement test.

After I took the test, I sat in the guidance counselor’s office to wait for the results. This was back when computers took up an entire room, so I’m sure the test was graded by hand. It took all afternoon.

There was another girl my age waiting also. We started talking and discovered we had a lot in common. We were both military kids. She had five kids in her family; I had four. We talked all afternoon. Twenty minutes before the end of the day, I got my schedule and went to class. Ten minutes later, Elaine showed up. We were close friends from that day on.

Elaine’s family practically adopted me. Did they know what I was going through? I never told them. Her mother probably guessed although she never said anything to me. Back then people did not interfere with the way other parents raised their children.

Instead, I spent most weekends at her house. Her house was a little box that looked exactly like mine but it had an entirely different vibe because of the marvelous people who lived in it. They even took me on vacation with them. It was the first vacation that did not involve staying with relatives. Her parents rented a house on Lake Owasco in the Finger Lake region of New York. We drove up there in her family’s cavernous yellow station wagon, the kind with the “way back” seat. It was the best vacation I had ever had. I remember dreading the ride home because it meant I had to go home.

Elaine’s father was a military chaplain. Her mother was one of the sweetest, most generous people I have ever met. Both of Elaine’s parents were Christians in the purest sense of the world. Naturally they took me to church with them.

I had been to Sunday school a few times before that, but never to church. My parents were both ex-Catholics who despised the church. My mother went to a Catholic boarding school as a child, where the nuns tried to make her drink tomato (pronounced “toe-mah-toe”) juice because they thought she was puny and needed building up. How tomato juice was supposed to do that, I have no idea.

My dad was a different story. He did go to church with his second wife Doris, but he went in order to drum up business when he sold life insurance. He later became a Buddhist to please his fourth wife. He was religious when it suited him.

I found Christ through my friendship with Elaine and her family. There were two things that got me through my childhood—school and Christ. I went to school to get away from the house and to get support. Jesus gave me support of a different kind. I finished school a long time ago, but I still lean on Jesus.

Was it a coincidence that Elaine, who was the same age as me, showed up at the same school on the same day and without her school records? I don’t think so. God put her and her family in my path to help me manage during those painful years.

It’s funny how the things we learn as children stay with us through adulthood, both good and bad. Because I was saved so young, my faith has never wavered.

You know the coolest thing about faith? It goes with you wherever you go. You don’t have to remember to pack it because it’s already inside you. You can gain or lose weight and it stays intact. Get married, get divorced, have a baby, become a helicopter pilot, lose your job, whatever. It’s there. I pray every day for guidance and support as I work through this crisis.

I’ve lost touch with Elaine. Both her parents are dead now. I miss them all. Her family gave me the best gift—the gift of faith.